We are all—every one of us–pre-disposed to occupying a few chosen opinions with more passion than that with which we embrace most others. Each of us harbors those few, favored ideas that matter to us, despite the fact that those very same concepts rarely matter to anybody else in anything like the same configuration or at anything like the same level of intensity. After a few decades of living around pet theories, though, most of us eventually figure out exactly what our pre-dispositions are and even learn to acknowledge them for what they are—hot spots, guaranteed trigger points, cause celebres. Most of my own favorites are theological, of course, and after having lived with them for more than just a few decades by now, I really can catalog them without a moment’s thought.  Near the very top of my list is the principle that living one’s entire religious life only in one’s head is not only limiting, it is downright dangerous. By default, it condemns one forever to an unholy subsistence in a morass of creeds and an amorphous soup of words.  To know with only the mind is like letting the car determine where it will take the driver, or so it is for me. As a result, I am always outspokenly grateful whenever I come upon another human being—especially an articulate and engaging one—who shares my passionate pull toward total knowing. I am even more outspokenly grateful when the articulate and engaging human being happens as well to be an ordained clergyperson. Fr. Gary Jones is rector of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, VA. He wrote the other day to say that he had broken a long-standing policy at St. Stephen’s. Every month, the rector is expected to put out a parish letter to all St. Stephen’s parishioners. The format is deliberately brief and not theologically heavy. This April, however, Fr. Jones said, his monthly letter to the St. Stephen’s parish broke with both parts of that tradition. It was the “actualness” approach to scripture that drove him to this April’s letter, he says.  Here, just as the good folk in Richmond received it the other day, is Fr. Jones’s letter. I hope you will stand as convicted as I of its truth, its grace, and its warning: 

Eternity – A Letter to the People of St. Stephen’s Church

The noted author and lecturer on religion, Phyllis Tickle, has written a fascinating new book entitled, The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord.  Most of the book is a compilation of Jesus’ sayings, all that he said, without the surrounding narrative of the four gospels.  The effect of reading the words of Jesus like this is stark and powerful.  One realizes that the narrative of the gospels serves more than one purpose.  Not only does the narrative situate us in a particular landscape and move the story along, it also serves to cushion the sharply defined and at times severe words of our Lord.  Without the narrative of the gospels, Jesus’ sayings can seem probing, penetrating and potent.

In her reflections that accompany her compilation of Jesus’ sayings, Phyllis Tickle notes that biblical scholars have long pointed out the predominance of Jesus’ teachings about the end times.  When she was working on this Gospel of the Sayings of Jesus, Phyllis said that this emphasis in Jesus’ teachings came into stark relief for her.  Like many of us, Phyllis admitted that she had, over time, managed to lapse into a kind of theological laissez-faire about the end times and doctrines like eternal damnation.  In fact, she comments, many people like her have commonly assumed that focusing too much on things like this was only for “fundamentalists and weirdoes.”

But when you are faced with the intensity and frequency of Jesus’ teachings about these things, you tend to sit up and take notice.  In Phyllis’ case, it sent her deeper into prayer.  “And what I came out with,” she writes, “may be as ordinary and obvious to every other Christian as it has been barrier-breaking for me.  What the Sayings share and rest on is the very simple principle that human life cannot end.” (pp. 29-30)

Poets and philosophers through the ages have intuited and reasoned about the immortality of the soul, but in Jesus we find something different, something more intense, urgent and consuming.  It is as if a dim or flickering light has become extraordinarily brilliant and radiant in Jesus.  Phyllis Tickle describes her experience of God in Jesus as a “Yearning” for us, a burning to help us grasp the implications of our endless lives. 

In other words, it matters very much how we live our lives.  And although the concept of Hell has an inescapable concreteness in the Sayings of Jesus, our consolation is in realizing that God burns with desire for us and with the need to make God’s way of Life known to us.  It is not that we need to understand and profess all of the right doctrines.  Jesus was not yearning with a desire to have us all say the same creed.  Instead, he yearned with the desire to show us the Way of Life, so that we would devote our immortal souls to life, not death.

What does this mean for you?  This is something you have to discover for yourself, and the process of spiritual discovery requires something significant of us.  Listen intently with the ear of your heart to the words of Jesus.  Bring yourself to Communion with a deepening sense of reverence for the mystery of God’s presence with you and within you.  Recognize that there is a way of knowing that is deeper than intellectual knowing.  Listen with your heart, and take Jesus’ words with you in prayer.  Make your times of prayer frequent and regular – Christianity is not a drive-thru religion.  Do not expect sudden “aha” experiences; just be still in God’s presence, and rest in a posture of openness with our Lord’s sayings. 

Another way of saying this is, “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.  For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Matthew 7:7-8)  Just remember: it’s not about having all the answers or believing the right doctrines; it’s about discovering the path of life, the pearl of great price, the joy for which we were created.

                                                                          Gary Jones +